“Garden houses” Design: Sugar Factory Laborers Housing Cooperatives, Kayseri

ONLINE JOURNAL OF ART AND DESIGN, cilt.11, sa.11, ss.59-76, 2023 (Hakemli Dergi)

As a result of increasing industrialization during the Post World War II period in Turkey, new

factories were established in Anatolia and, therefore, migration to the cities increased. Thus,

a housing problem arose for factory laborers, resulting in a need for housing and laborers

building cooperative houses in the areas close to the factory. In this context, seven building

cooperatives with different names were established from 1954 to 1970 in order to

accommodate laborers in Kayseri Sugar Factory, which was opened in Kayseri in 1955. The

first phase of Sugar Housing Cooperative houses, which started to be built in 1958 as 72

houses, was designed by the Civil Engineer Fuat Attaroğlu. Sugar Laborers Housing

Cooperative houses are examined within the scope of this study, as they are one of the

original building cooperative examples that were designed in the context of the garden-

house with a modern architectural design approach in 1950’s.

The study employs qualitative techniques such as data collection from newspaper texts,

architectural drawings, visual and written materials and document analysis. Sugar Housing

Cooperative houses reflect the architectural design concept, original housing plan types,

building techniques and material properties between the years of 1950 and 1970 in the

modernization process. Cooperative houses in this period played an important role in

transforming the city into one with a modern identity. In this study, it is suggested that the

still inhabited cooperative houses must be registered and protected with their modern

identity in terms of creating an exemplary architectural representation in the western

periphery of the city...